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She first appears in the Fifth Doctor serial Planet of Fire, in which she encounters the Doctor and Turlough on the island of Lanzarote. After an encounter with the Master and the shapechanging android Kamelion (who disguises himself as her stepfather, Professor Howard Foster), Peri asks to join the Fifth Doctor on his travels, while Turlough departs to return to his home planet of Trion. (The identity of Peri's mother is not revealed in the televised series, but see below.)

As they are both suffering from spectrox poisoning on Androzani, the Fifth Doctor decides to give what antidote remains to Peri, sacrificing himself to save her. As she looks on, he regenerates into the Sixth Doctor at the end of The Caves of Androzani and she continues to travel with him, despite the fact that one of the first things the temporarily unstable Sixth Doctor does is try to strangle her (The Twin Dilemma).

Peri is a bright, spirited young woman in her early twenties, who travels with the Doctor because, like many of his companions, she wants to see the universe. Although she shares a more abrasive relationship with the Sixth Doctor, there is an undercurrent of affection in their verbal sparring.

Peri travels with the Doctor for an undisclosed period of time; some sources say she travels with him for mere months, while others say years. Between the events of Revelation of the Daleks and the season-long story The Trial of a Time Lord, the character is shown to have matured somewhat (coinciding with an 18-month production break between the two stories) and her relationship with the Doctor becomes less combative.

In the second segment of the Trial story arc, Mindwarp, Peri is abducted by an arthropod-like creature named Kiv, who apparently transplants his brain into her body. Soon after, the Doctor is led to believe that Peri is dead, and is severely distressed by this. It is later revealed at the end of The Ultimate Foe (the fourth segment of the arc) that the evidence of Peri's death was faked by the Valeyard. Peri has, in fact, survived, saved by, and married King Yrcanos of Thoros Alpha, a warrior king who had assisted the Doctor and Peri during the Mindwarp incident. It is not known what happens to Peri after she marries Yrcanos.

Peri Brown has the distinction of being the first humanoid television companion to appear in the Doctor Who Magazinecomic strip (previously the strip, which began in 1979, depicted the Doctor either travelling alone or with companions created for the strip, while the robotic television companion K9 was featured in several DWM comic strips featuring the Fourth Doctor). Her first appearance is in "Funhouse Part 1" (DWM #102) in which she appears in two panels as a scantily clad apparition manifested by a villain. Two issues later, in "Kane's Story Part 1" (DWM #104), she becomes a regular character in the strip, initially travelling with both the Sixth Doctor and his shape-shifting companion, Frobisher and continuing until the final part of "Up Above the Gods" in DWM #129. "Kane's Story" establishes that Peri at one point during her travels with the Sixth Doctor leaves the TARDIS for reasons left unrevealed and goes to live in New York City where she takes a job in an office, a job she angrily quits for reasons also unrevealed just prior to encountering the Doctor again and voluntarily rejoining him.

The epilogue to the Target Books novelisation of Mindwarp by Philip Martin states that Peri returns to the 20th Century with Yrcanos where the latter becomes a professional wrestler. This tongue-in-cheek conclusion is not reflected in any televised story, and is generally ignored by fandom.

In the Marvel Comicsgraphic novelThe Age of Chaos, written by Colin Baker, Peri lives out her life on Krontep as Yrcanos's Queen and has at least three grandchildren, who are principal characters in the story.

Bryant voiced the character of Peri in several audio plays produced by Big Finish Productions, alongside both Peter Davison as the Fifth Doctor and Colin Baker as the Sixth Doctor. In several of these stories, the Fifth Doctor and Peri are joined by another companion, the Egyptian princess Erimem.

In the audio play Her Final Flight, the Sixth Doctor finds Peri on a remote planet, where she apparently dies of a virus, although it is revealed that the entire story was part of a fantasy designed to make The Doctor kill himself.

One audio play, The Reaping, introduces Peri's mother, Janine Foster, played by American actress Claudia Christian (although in reality, Christian is five years younger than Nicola Bryant). The play, set in 1984, confirms Peri's late father's name as Paul and mentions that Howard and Janine Foster have gone their separate ways, but does not mention Peri's step-siblings. Janine is killed at the end of the play due to an accident involving Cyber-technology, cutting Peri's last familial tie to Earth.

Another audio play, Peri and the Piscon Paradox, states that the Time Lords made several adjustments to her time line, resulting in at least five alternate versions of Peri with different fates, including one that thought she never travelled in the TARDIS but instead moved to California and eventually hosted a talk show called The Queen of Worries.

In the later audio The Widow's Assassin, the Doctor travels to Krontep to attend Peri's wedding, only be locked up for abandoning her. However, despite apparently spending five years in prison, the Doctor actually spends that time carrying out a complex long-term investigation into the death of King Yrcanos shortly after the wedding, eventually learning that 'Peri' is actually possessed by Mandrake the Lizard King, the Doctor's childhood imaginary enemy, who was 'extracted' from the Doctor's mind when he was exposed to Crozier's equipment. After transferring himself into Peri's body to expel Mandrake, the Doctor and Peri return to their true bodies and resume their travels together. In Masters of Earth, they arrive on Earth during the Dalek occupation, a year before the events of The Dalek Invasion of Earth from Earth's perspective, forcing the Doctor to help a future famous rebel figure escape without compromising history. In The Rani Elite, the Doctor and Peri visit a famous university and are nearly caught in a trap set by a version of the Rani who has already experienced the events of Time and the Rani; the crisis ends with Peri receiving an honorary degree in Botany to accompany the Doctor's honorary degree in moral philosophy.

Bryant played the role of "Miss Brown" in the first three installments of the BBV video series The Stranger, opposite Colin Baker as the Stranger; although the character is never explicitly identified as being Peri (much as the Stranger was never directly linked to the Doctor) there are nonetheless similarities in the two characters, with one major difference: Bryant uses her natural English accent for Miss Brown rather than affecting an American one as she did with Peri.